Layer 517 . . . LibDems, the NHS Bill, and Banker Bashing

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Yesterday Oxzen was out and about on the sunny streets of downtown Bermondsey when . . . what should he espy other than a flock of Liberal Democrats, gathered together on a pavement, looking as if they were about to go a-canvassing with their clipboards and leaflets.

Having walked past them it was tempting to go back and accost them with a few questions:

"What are you people doing about opposing the NHS bill?!"

"When are you going to demand the bill is abandoned?"

"Why is your party allowing Clegg and Cameron to go ahead with the bill?"

"Don't you realise that the likes of Tim Montgomerie and his conservativehome blog have called for the bill to be abandoned? Don't you people realise your party is now well to the right of the Tory heartland?"

"Do you really want to see NHS services farmed out to make profits for the private sector?"

But I didn't.

Sometimes, though, you have to admire Simon Hughes:

Lansley should be replaced after health bill becomes law, says Hughes

Lib Dem deputy leader says health secretary should 'move on' to enable government to put NHS controversy behind it

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/feb/12/lansley-replaced-health-bill-hughes

A leading Liberal Democrat sparked renewed speculation about Andrew Lansley's future when he said David Cameron should find a new health secretary after the health bill becomes law.

The Lib Dem deputy leader, Simon Hughes, said he believed Lansley needed to "move on" in the second half of this parliament so the government could put the controversy over the NHS reforms behind it.

Hughes's comments will not be welcome in Downing Street, where Cameron has been defending Lansley in response to calls from the influential ConservativeHome website for him to be replaced and an anonymous briefing from a No 10 source saying the health secretary should be "taken out and shot".

Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, he said: "I'm clear we need to move on from this bill. My political judgment is that in the second half of parliament it would be better [for Lansley] to move on."

When asked whether he was saying Lansley should be replaced, he confirmed that he was, but also accepted that he needed to be "careful about the political sensitivities of this coalition".

Although Hughes is not a minister, he is the most senior figure in the party to call for Lansley to be replaced.

He spoke out as Labour stepped up its attack on the health reforms, releasing an internal Department of Health letter saying too many patients were facing delays because trusts were failing to meet waiting time targets.

The coalition finds itself under fire on many fronts. The Mail on Sunday reported that McKinsey, which has received almost £14m from the government for work on the NHS, paid for health regulator staff from Monitor – including the chairman, chief operating officer and director of strategy – to attend lavish events.

A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times showed only 18% of people said they supported the NHS reforms. It revealed that 48% opposed them, with 34% saying they were not sure.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/

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Why we need more banker bashing

Banks are the biggest scroungers of public money – solutions will not simply materialise if we don't keep up the pressure

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/07/why-we-need-more-banker-bashing

by Sunny Hundal

Banking reform has been pitifully weak. If the crash were to happen again tomorrow, the government would have to bail them out again. They remain leveraged up to their eyeballs; remain "too big to fail" and too inter-connected to each other so most can't be allowed to go bust. Without public anger there is no impetus to push banking reforms further, which the Conservatives are stridently resisting and Labour is still reluctant to push too far.

Banker bashing begs a wider question – if finance has become the life-blood of modern economies, why can't we exercise more control over such a vital industry? Consider this: we pretend that banks are private businesses that should be allowed to run their own affairs. But they are the biggest scroungers of public money of our time. Banks are lent vast sums of money by central banks at near-zero interest. They lend that money to us or back to the government at higher rates and rake in the difference by the billion. They don't even have to make clever investments to make huge profits.

Far from being the pinnacle of free market capitalism, banking is full of sorry executives who keep asking for more handouts to protect their deliberately bloated businesses. The solutions won't materialise if we go back to how things were. Public anger has grown because it is starting to dawn on middle England that while the rest of us are paying for the crisis, the people who caused the crash want to go back to 2007. Even the Daily Mail is starting to reflect this impatience. This recession is already longer than the 1930s and the stagnation will continue for maybe a decade. For from being over, the nightmare for the Goodwins and Hesters is just getting started. And quite rightly too.

Good comments by moretorybullshit and others beneath this article.
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Layer 516 . . . Killing the NHS Bill, Marketising the Health Service, and Sensible Conservatism

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In the previous blog there was a piece about the future of Conservatism. The Conservative party is very much in the news again today.

Tim Montgomerie's an interesting chap. He runs a blog called ConservativeHome. Some time ago he wrote a column for the Guardian in which he said, among many other things,

I’m not defending the financial sector. Greedy banks hid toxic debts in increasingly ingenious financial vehicles that fooled every auditor, every regulator and every ratings agency until it was too late. But who was really fooling who?

Capitalism is not immoral but amoral. It does what its users demand of it . . . It will invent whatever instruments governments and consumers want, and if not given limits, its inventiveness knows few bounds.

These limits come from two sources: politicians and culture. And ultimately, it’s the culture that counts.

We have entered a vicious cycle where both government and capitalism have eaten into the culture’s ability to be a countervailing and moderating force.

Liberal capitalism requires social conservatism. It needs the virtue-generating institutions or there’ll be no thrift, no duty, no honesty, no Protestant work ethic.

Civilisation is a project that starts anew with every generation, else we’re all on the road to the Lord of the Flies. It has traditionally been the work of the family, church, synagogue or mosque, but in an era when families are weaker and places of worship are in decline, there are big questions as to who will discourage people from getting into impossible debt in order to buy things that can’t give them happiness. 

We need to tax unearned wealth more and wealth creation less. Big companies should feel greater obligation to employ local labour.

But arguments about the integrity of capitalism are, in the end, just diversions from the underlying weakness of our time. How do we put moral limits on big business, big government and the people who operate them? More pertinently, how do we put limits on ourselves?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/11/capitalism-amoral-worst-enemy-people

The country needs thoughtful Conservatives like Mr Montgomerie - if only to keep in check the Nasty Party and the right-wing nutters.

Today's Guardian website contains the following article:

Cameron should scrap NHS bill and drop Lansley, says influential Tory blog


ConservativeHome editor says health secretary has failed to win public support for health and social care bill


http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/10/cameron-scrap-nhs-bill-lansley


David Cameron has been urged to replace Andrew Lansley and drop large chunks of the health bill by the Conservative party's most widely read and influential website.


Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, said in a post published on Friday that Lansley, the health secretary, had failed to win public support for the legislation and that, if the Tories did not back down, every problem with the NHS over the next three years would be blamed on the bill.


The ConservativeHome intervention is particularly damaging to Cameron because Montgomerie says he was encouraged to speak out by three Conservative cabinet minsters who believe that pressing ahead with the bill would be folly.


"One was insistent the bill must be dropped. Another said Andrew Lansley must be replaced. Another likened the NHS reforms to the poll tax," says Montgomerie in his article.


"The consensus is that the prime minister needs an external shock to wake him to the scale of the problem."


ConservativeHome is not officially linked to the Conservative party. But it is read by thousands of activists, whose views it broadly represents, and, although it does criticise government policy, it is generally supportive and not given to gratuitous attacks on the party leadership.


On Friday Montgomerie told the Today programme why he had decided to publish his article. "I wrote this blog this morning because I think the feeling is David Cameron isn't listening enough to internal party feeling and this is why I have gone public," he said.


Montgomerie says Cameron faces a choice. "Path one involves removing all contentious components of the bill," he writes. A gutted bill could then be passed with cross-party agreement. "It would be humiliating to forge such a cross-party deal but the humiliation would subside over a few weeks.


"Path two involves pressing on. It's the path that, despite his rhetoric, Ed Miliband prays the coalition will tread. Pressing on avoids the immediate political pain but leaves the chronic electoral problem in place. By 'succeeding' in enacting a contentious bill every inevitable problem that arises in the NHS in the years ahead will be blamed on it. That's a heavy price to pay for a bill that is neither transformational nor necessary."


Montgomerie, who says that Cameron's "greatest political achievement" as leader of the opposition was to stop the Conservatives being seen as an anti-NHS party, says Lansley should go. "He hasn't been able to communicate these reforms in a streetwise way," Montgomerie says.


The ConservativeHome broadside was published after it was revealed that Lib Dem activists want to call a vote on scrapping the bill at the Lib Dem spring conference next month.


Lansley faced fresh embarrassment on Friday when a report by the right-of-centre thinktank Reform said the government's entire reform of public services was being undermined by the Department of Health's management of NHS changes.

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Denis Campbell, the Guardian's health correspondent, had this column in the paper:

ConservativeHome attack on NHS reform may prove game-changing


A consensus is emerging over which parts of the bill should survive if Andrew Lansley's 'big bang' reforms are dropped

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/10/conservativehome-attack-nhs-bill

Among Conservative Home editor Tim Montgomerie's telling points in his potentially game-changing piece about the government's NHS plans is his description of the health and social care bill as "not only mangled and bureaucratic but also unnecessary".


The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, a minister for whom the word embattled could have been invented, has previously admitted that many of the radical changes he wants to see in the NHS in England do not actually require the gargantuan, hugely unpopular legislation that is now dividing the cabinet and may yet end his career rather than prove the defining high point he hopes. Many of the best-informed health policy experts, such as those at the King's Fund thinktank, have said the same thing.


All the way through this bill's tortuous, increasingly divisive passage significant voices have argued consistently that the NHS should be concentrating on meeting Nicholson's £20bn savings challenge by 2014-15, not being blown up and put back together in the sort of top-down reorganisation that David Cameron pledged not to implement. Stephen Dorrell, the last health secretary in the last Tory administration and now chair of the Commons health select committee, has cogently argued that position for months, his committee's reports increasingly sceptical about the bill's many likely negative impacts, but without ever explicitly criticising Lansley's plan. At least three of his colleagues in Cameron's cabinet are clearly less reserved.

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Tim Mongomerie's own blog, reproduced in a column in the Guardian today, says:

NHS bill may be the death of Tories' election prospects


Unless David Cameron kills off the bill, it, and the Conservatives, will be blamed for every NHS problem for years to come


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/10/nhs-bill-tories-election-prospects


The NHS was long the Conservative party's achilles heel. David Cameron's greatest political achievement as leader of the opposition was to neutralise health as an issue. The greatest mistake of his time as prime minister has been to put it back at the centre of political debate.


Many Conservatives think that the NHS needs fundamental reform, but for far-reaching reform to succeed certain preonditions must be met. The public needs to have been persuaded that substantial change is necessary. The government cannot be distracted by other consuming projects; its best brains must be focused and single-minded in ensuring the policy's success. The Whitehall machine needs to be prepared and co-operative. The health secretary needs to enjoy significant goodwill amongst NHS staff and possess exceptional communication skills.


Few – perhaps none – of those preconditions exist.


Earlier this week David Cameron and Nick Clegg decided again that they would plough on with the health and social care bill. Clegg was particularly reluctant. Cameron was resigned to doing so. Neither were enthusiastic.


ConservativeHome supports the government's radicalism on schools, welfare and the deficit. We'd like to see much more ambition on competitiveness and changing Britain's relationship with Europe. The NHS bill is not just a distraction from all of this, but potentially fatal to the Conservative party's electoral prospects. It must be stopped before it's too late.

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Polly Toynbee's recent column on the NHS bill:

The NHS bill could finish the health service – and David Cameron


The market ideology of the health and social care bill shows that the pragmatic prime minister is on another planet


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/06/nhs-bill-finish-cameron-ideology


Andrew Lansley's last refuge is his most disreputable argument so far: his health and social care bill must pass as so much has already been implemented without waiting for royal assent. None can recall such flagrant flouting of parliament.


All but abolished are 151 primary care trusts – replaced by 279 clinical commissioning groups – while strategic health authorities are to become four hubs. The new national commissioning board already has a chief executive and finance director with seven board members recruited on salaries of up to £170,000 before the bill is passed. Brass plate shifting has squandered £2bn, while the NHS suffers cuts of £20bn. McKinsey and KPMG already have fat contracts to take over much commissioning supposed to be done by GPs. Which sector will they instinctively favour for contracts? Yet none of it has yet passed into law.


"Too late," the health secretary says with grim glee, and Lansley's alarmed party believes it's so. Of course it's not and the bill could be withdrawn. A U-turn would be greeted with guffaws by the opposition, but that would be less politically dangerous than the cataclysm likely to engulf the NHS shortly. Andrew George, the Lib Dem MP and member of the health select committee, puts it like this: "It will now cause havoc either way, but going ahead is even more catastrophic".


Opposition is unprecedented as the government scrapes around for support from insignificant medical groups, most with commercial links. The BMA tends to oppose change, from Nye Bevan to Ken Clarke and Blair. But it's remarkable that so many royal colleges are opposed, even the Royal College of GPs, supposed to be a beneficiary. Editors of the three medical journals object. The health select committee, dominated by coalition MPs, issues dire warnings.


Will the voters understand? They know one big thing: Cameron promised to protect the NHS, yet hundreds of units will go bust as waiting times soar. Ed Miliband put it crisply: the money wasted could pay for the 6,000 nurses the NHS is cutting. On the NHS Labour did well, eliminating long waits, with its highest ever public approval; the OECD named it the one of the best performers in the world. This is Labour turf. Cameron will regret digging it up.
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Layer 438 . . . Humour, Grim Reality, Hard Times, Resistance, Passivity, Complicity, Regime Change and Accountability

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An old mate of mine suggested that these blogs are lacking in a sense of humour, and I can't argue with that. This is hardly comedy central. In fact, THIS is Comedy Central -

http://www.comedycentral.com/

Alternatively, it's worth checking out Private Eye for humourous comment on politics and current affairs:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/

I like a good laugh myself, and the people at Comedy Central and Private Eye are the best in the business. Then there are the folks on The News Quiz - Sandi Toksvig, Jeremy Hardy, Andy Hamilton, Fred MacAulay, Francis Wheen, Sue Perkins, Phil Jupitus, et al. Unmissable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9yq

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/newsquiz/ 

Still bedding down is Channel 4's new current affairs '10 O'Clock Live' show on Thursdays, which features Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell. It's very amusing in parts.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/10-oclock-live

Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian is also a must-read.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker

Also Have I Got News For You.

In the interest of putting smiles on faces, Oxzen welcomes and will publish any contributions from readers in the way of witticisms, jokes, gags, japes and jests. No payment or reward, but credit and a name check will be given for any material submitted.

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There's a real art to being funny about what's going on in the world. For the most part the news is grim. The coalition is still saying there's no Plan B. They're still determined to slash public spending far faster than is even remotely necessary. This week there's constant dismay about the loss of public libraries, which Tories clearly don't give a shit about. They never use them. Never have and never will.

And talking of giving a shit - Manchester council has said it will reduce the number of its public toilets from 13 to ONE. Joke!!

This morning there was news about corruption going on in the privatisation of air/sea rescue services. It's even come to this - outsourcing and profit-making from public safety and rescue services.

Bastards like Toby Young and Michael Gove are still thrusting ahead with their plans to privatise schools and education, and completely mess up coherent public provision - and to do it all through the use of public money. Same applies to health and hospitals, where all manner of people and professional bodies are saying the government's proposals are going to be a disaster , but it won't make a jot of difference; private companies will be allowed into the 'market'  to cherry pick the most profitable bits, leaving the rest of the health service to deal with the hard stuff.

There's a revolution going on - a Chicago-School hard-line political convulsion - and there needs to be a coherent and organised response to it. None of this is necessary, none of it was voted for, it's not beneficial to the majority of us, it's not pleasant, and it's not funny. Piss-taking alone won't solve anything.

When people say "So what did you personally do to resist this reactionary evil?" it won't be enough to say I looked the other way, or I ignored it, or I made fun of it, or even - I wrote about it.

What's the next worse thing to having your country over-run by a bunch of fascists in jackboots? How about having it taken over and run by a bunch of hard-line neo-cons for the benefit of bankers, oligarchs, landowners and City fat cats? How about having more and more public assets stripped and sold off for the benefit of the already-rich?

What's the difference between a Mubarak and a bunch of his chums doing the bidding of Big Money, Multi-Nationals and Big Finance, to the detriment of 'ordinary' people, and David Cameron and his chums doing the bidding of Big Money, Big Business and Big Finance? Not a lot. Not that New Labour were any better. So what do we do about it?

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Why bother commenting on any of it, particularly for no obvious reward? I do ask myself this question sometimes.

Clearly the answer is that diarists, journal writers and bloggers write because they feel a strange compulsion to keep track of their mental, emotional and physical lives, and keep track of what's happening in the world. Primarily they do it for themselves, and it doesn't really matter whether anyone else reads it, or what anyone else thinks about it. Though feedback is much appreciated, especially when there are inaccuracies in the pieces.

There's also a desire to share with other people some of the interesting stuff that's available on the Internet, TV, radio, etc. I know I've had tremendous benefit from linking with what other bloggers and writers recommend by way of reading, videos, TV, and so on.

Take the situation in Egypt, for example. I now compulsively watch and listen to al-Jazeera to keep up with what's happening in Tahrir Square and throughout the country, and I like the fact that they have such a wide range of correspondents who report and comment on the situation both within the country and from as far afield as Washington and Australia. It's an additional bonus that citizen 'journalists' who have nothing to do with the major media organisations are also commenting on what's going on.

Who can forget the Baghdad Blogger and his ilk some years back?

It's a real pity that some folks don't have the time or the energy - or even the means - to share with others their thoughts on their lives and on the world from their own unique perspective. Does it really matter, though? Yes it does. Those who haven't discovered the benefits of personal writing really don't appreciate what they're missing. It's fine not to share it, but JFDI.

Waka waka.

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This morning my son patiently explained why the banks should all have been taken into State control at the point when the whole system went bust - after allowing the banks themselves to go bust. He pointed out that they could have been up and running again immediately with the salaries of employees paid from profits - once their massive debts had been written off. He was very clear about the need at that point for the government to guarantee the modest deposits of ordinary customers. As for the ill-gotten gains and the huge losses of the billionaires and squillionaires and hedge-funders who are the promoters of the rackets and the bubbles and of casino capitalism in general - who gives a shit? My son's adamant that we would all be a lot happier if we settled for having less money whilst insisting we have more time for personal pursuits and better relationships.

He really gets it.

Why doesn't everyone?

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